What's the point in modelling the base mesh?
This is my personal view, based on my own experience, so some others may see things differently: Sculpting from scratch is possible, but works best with purely organic forms which don't have a lot of lengthy or technical structural features. If they do have these, then it can be expedient, I believe, to begin with a modeling process instead of a sculpting process. You can use both processes, of course, and alternate between them. It can sometimes be efficient to begin with a modeling process and move over to a sculpting one, once the overall structure is in place, and you now want to create finer details. You can also get a lot of good use out of booleans when sculpting because the resulting topology issues aren't yet a concern. Also, bear in mind that sculpting only leads to triangle faces when Dyntopo is enabled. If disabled, sculpting brushes only push vertices around, but don't actually change the topology, which is one possible approach that might be more compatible with a workflow that switches back and forth between modeling and sculpting. So don't discount the use of both methods. I would never want to suggest that one of these methods is always preferable to the other.